Mailing list etiquette

Mailing list etiquette

The mailing lists tend to be high traffic and quickly suck away the time and mailbox space of those volunteering their time to help. Therefore we ask that a few simple rules be followed to make the experience nicer for everyone. These are not hard and fast rules and we don't mean to be controlling; the lists are not moderated. You must be subscribed to post to the list.

In general traditional Usenet etiquette covers most of it.

Some requests:

• "Just the facts, ma'am" - Smaller to the point posts means we can handle a higher rate of traffic with less overhead.

• Avoid posting in HTML. It makes it hard to read for some people and bloats the email size.

• Avoid posting large attachments. The mailing list blocks very large attachments, and although smaller attachments are allowed through it is nicer to find some web space somewhere and post a URL to it rather than spam 1000 mailing list readers' long suffering inboxes with a largish file. Gmail webspace and Flickr are two places you might post data files and screenshots.

• "This email is intended for you and you alone" footer notes have no place on a public list and may be considered rude. They are probably legally useless anyway.

• A: Topposting.
• Q: What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

• When replying to a message please crop away any useless quoted text, for example office phone numbers, mailing list details, irrelevant parts of the conversation, etc. Please do keep "So and so wrote:" tags so that someone reading an email can follow the quoted conversation without having to hunt back through the thread to see who said what.